Design, ingenuity and imagination

Invention in design means putting into practice a technical/scientific idea that is the result of ingenuity. But it is also the pure capacity for imagination, capable of «altering the sensibility of the human race» (Kubler, 1962), acting as much upon the product’s functions as upon the meaning. And indeed, invention in design is a process that is not in the least ingenuous or visionary, but the outcome of a highly sophisticated process, capable of selecting forms and technologies to obtain the maximum expressive result with the minimum exhibition of formal effort, and of stereotyping itself in formally essential objects. This is why innovation, for design, cannot be resolved only as a “muscular” display of innovative technologies, of use more for simplifying realization processes than for creating new functions or new languages. The designer’s activity is in fact mainly that of serving as a mediator between art, technology, and society, interpreting not only functions, but also the meaning of discoveries in inventions of “sign mediations” and of new “social garments” (Zingale, 2012). Starting from these assumptions, the paper proposes a classification by categories, in which innovation in design is read as the result of a technological transfer process; as a spontaneous or even random activity; as the ability to apply “simplexity” by making the complex simple; or as a reaction to limitations and scant resources, by offering a vantage point that, without denying the potentials offered by recent innovations, aims to reaffirm the more humanistic and less technocratic dimension of our inventive capacity. This inventive capacity is not played out in the aesthetic dimension alone, but can join this imagination to define new uses, functions, and languages. Starting from here, the designer can and must set off again – while keeping his or her role well in mind – to configure a new humanism.